An Easy Way to Overperform

Invest your time and energy into making your customers feel good to be doing business with you. If you want to outdo your competition – creativity can be better than cash. It's the small different things that your customers will remember

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing Blogs: When a customer orders a product or engages your services, toss in something extra. You don’t need to make a big deal of it but do it systematcially and don’t advertise it.

I agree 100%.

Let me give you a few examples of surprises that I've used or had used on me that worked:

We sent out Mothers Day cards to clients of ours who were mothers. This is something nobody else does. We got great feedback from our clients that they were touched that we thought of them. The cards cost around two dollars a piece including the stamp. Some of our clients represent tens of thousands of dollars in revenue to us. What a great win!

When Amazon.com was first around I bought so many books from them that they gave me free priority mail shipping without my asking. They also sent me a mug and a mouse pad at Christmas. It seems they now may think they are too big to throw in these extras – or they just weren't cost effective. But I loved it.

A Chinese restaurant that my wife and I used to order from weekly would always throw something in for free – usually an appetizer.

Think about a time, maybe as a child, when you got a totally unexpected gift that just floored you. How did it make you feel? Now imagine that you make your customers feel like that on a regular basis. They will want to do business with you more and more to get that good feeling.

J D Moore – Marketing Comet